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DECEMBER, 1893.]
NOTES ON ANTIQUITIES IN RAMANNADESA.
348
(9) A king seated on a throne with people kneeling before him. In the background is a man being." elbowed."50
(10) A man in a garden, or forest, has hold of an enormous serpent. A prince is seated on the ground with three princesses' kneeling on his left, one behind the other. The neaddresses are all of the well-known Näga type in Buddhist (Indian) sculptures. The dress otherwise is Burmese.::
(11) A king is seated on a throne, and an attendant kneeling is announcing the arrival of the queen. The queen, gorgeously apparelled and grave of countenance, is carried on a seat on the shoulders of four men. Behind are ambrellas, fans, swishes, &c.
(12) A prince is standing on the back of a man stretched on the ground. A man in front has hold of the victim's hair with one hand and holds a sword in the other. Behind are two kneeling women. Around are elephants, buffaloes, pigs and other animals.
The bas-reliefs at Amarapure are merely humorous grotesques, but those from Pegu (and (?) Syriam) had evidently a more serious meaning. A great number represent, no doubt, what we should call “foreigners," who to the ancient and medieval mind were largely people endowed with terrible faculties, features and forms. An attempt has been made to depict these mythical peoples in detail, and we find them endowed with stout formidable bodies and the heads of every creature known to the artists. They are generally represented as being naked as to the body and legs, and clad only with a cloth round the loins, no doubt in the fashion of the poorer classes of the time. The glazing of all the tablets is good and regular, and the colors prevalent are white, red, green, yellow, black and blue. The blue colour of some of the bodies represents perhaps the dark skin of the supposed foreigner One of the tablets represents two female figures, naked from the waist upwards, and clad only with a short garment drawn up tightly between the legs after the fashion of the Malay sarung, and of the lower orders of Siamese women, vide Crawfurd, Embassy to Sian, p. 115, illustration, which confirms the iden that these grotesque figures merely represent the people of a foreign nation.
On some, however, of the Pega tablets are representations of great personages of the time elaborately clad, crowned and jewelled. (See Plates IX., IX, XII. and XIII.) Only one, ou of over a hundred found at Pegu,51 has & legible inscription on it, and this inscription is, so far, largely a puzzle, which is disappointing, as there is no special difficulty in reading the characters, since they are of the square lapidary type common in these parts up till quite lately. Plate IX. gives a reproduction of it, and below is a tracing from a photograpla, on a scale-of-7. Tinc anys Tart
!
Lidt Dan Inn
The
y
be either Tahing, Burmese or Shan
timing it to be Talsing,
whment The p
month. The person to be punished is made to kneel down and bend forward. He is then
ween the shoulders and somewhat lower by the elbow of the punisher. The pain ga need is great and
"On very few is there any sign, of lost inscription. I have howeves einee found a similapoblet in Bangoon, presumably taken from the same site, and having precisely the same sincriptions that in the text, but in a more cursive form. It is shewa in Plate LX a. Low, see Indo-China, Vol. I. p. 197f., makes the, for him tory ourious mistake't saying that there are no inscriptions in Lower Burma! The opposite is the fact, and proper tionately there are many more historical inscriptions in Burma than in India.
